Of Three Good Women

I am not, in general, a collector of examples of wifely devotion — the genre has been too much worked and tends toward a flattery of the dead at the expense of honest observation. But there are three women in the ancient histories whom I find myself returning to, not because their stories confirm any doctrine about marriage or female virtue, but because they illuminate something stranger and more unsettling: the capacity of love, at its furthest extension, to become indistinguishable from a refusal of life itself.

The first is Arria, wife of Paetus, a Roman senator condemned to die under Claudius. When Paetus hesitated before his own death, uncertain how to proceed, Arria took the dagger first, stabbed herself, drew out the blade, and offered it to him with these words: “Paetus, it does not hurt.” She had answered, in advance and in her own body, the question he could not face.

“What astonishes me about Arria is not the dying — men have died for lesser things — but the composure. She had calculated what her husband needed and she gave it to him. The last act of her love was a demonstration: see, this is how it is done.”

The second is Pompeia Paulina, who opened her veins with Seneca when he was commanded to die, and who survived only because Nero ordered her wounds bound — he did not want to bear the notoriety of her death alongside her husband’s. She lived, therefore, against her will, which is a particular kind of suffering I cannot easily imagine.

The third, whose name is less certainly recorded, followed her husband into slavery and execution during one of the Eastern campaigns, having been offered and having refused a safe passage home. She could have lived, in comfort, in her own country. She chose not to.

What these three stories have in common is not merely loyalty but a specific act of imagination: each woman had fully envisioned the life that would remain after her husband’s death, had found it not worth the having, and had acted on that judgment. I do not know whether to call this love or something beyond love. I know only that it is one of the more extreme things human nature is capable of, and that extreme things deserve to be looked at directly.